Perspective | Ibram X. Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale — so was his rise (2024)

Throughout “Erasure,” which has recently been adapted into the film festival darling “American Fiction,” Monk is forced to wrestle with his new role as a race profiteer. Then and now, I read the novel like a warning: As a Black academic, I have spent most of my working life trying not to become Monk.

It’s a cautionary tale that has been on my mind lately as I’ve watched the implosion of the Black historian Ibram X. Kendi. Perhaps the leading figure of the contemporary “anti-racism” movement, Kendi has faced new scrutiny after he recently laid off more than half of the staff at his Center for Antiracist Research. Boston University, where the center is housed, has now opened an inquiry into how it was run. Allegations include poor pay, employee exploitation, the failure to produce any significant research and the mismanagement of $43 million in donations.

As one of a number of left-wing commentators who have been critical of mainstream anti-racism — and who believe the movement is little more than self-help for White people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities — I’ve watched the Kendi crisis unfold with a touch of schadenfreude. Yet though this public reckoning feels long overdue, I can’t help but also have a smidgen of empathy for the embattled anti-racism guru. Kendi was transformed from a respected historian — winner of the National Book Award for his 2016 tome, “Stamped From the Beginning,” but hardly a household name — to the head sage of a global progressive movement in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. No longer a mere ambassador for academic anti-racism, Kendi became a brand.

The prospect of Kendi’s unraveling is not — or at least, is not only — the story of a huckster who was happy to cash in on America’s racial trauma, slapping his name on strange children’s books, including “Antiracist Baby” and “Goodnight Racism,” while raking in hundreds of dollars a minute to give short talks at American universities. Instead, the Kendi affair is yet another example of an age-old truism: White American elites on both sides of the political spectrum — academics, publishers, members of the media, corporate leaders — are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda.

Kendi’s work has always courted acclaim and controversy in equal measure. “Stamped,” a more-than-500-page doorstop that charts a conceptual history of American racism, published during the halcyon final year of the Obama presidency, has a provocative and even ingenious thesis: Racist ideas don’t generate racist policies; instead, racist policies — defined as policies that produce disparities — give birth to racist ideas that serve to explain those inequalities after the fact. “Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate,” Kendi declares. “Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.”

By reversing the causal flow of racial inequality — insisting that the bad laws come first, the bigoted ideas later — Kendi mounted a frontal assault on the anemic liberal moralizing at the heart of mainstream American race discourse. He set out to dismantle the comforting assumption that racism is a problem of individual mental attitudes — the thoughtcrimes of mustache-twirling scoundrels who live in red states and rural places — and instead emphasized that racism is a systemic problem baked into our public and private institutions.

As Carlos Lozada wrote in The Washington Post at the time, “Stamped” is best understood as a broadside aimed at “the racism of good intentions,” one that declares feel-good, PC liberalism to be politically insufficient and incapable of redressing racial inequality. Kendi doesn’t mince words. “Uplift, persuasion, and education have not eradicated, and will not eradicate racist ideas, let alone racist policies,” he writes. Instead, he counsels progressives to let go of the insistence that the personal is political, to recognize that policy change — not consciousness raising — is the only path toward justice.

“Stamped” is, like most books of its length and ambition, highly imperfect. Some historians took issue with its misguided treatment of particular historical figures such as John Locke. As someone rather to the left of Kendi, I found his indictments of our economic order welcome but watery: Capitalism appears as a boogeyman in Kendi’s history, but not as a subject of substantive analysis. But these and other faults notwithstanding, it was clear that “Stamped” was a serious book by a serious academic whose goal was to make a real contribution to the history of ideas. It is also the last book Kendi wrote that meets that definition.

Published in August 2019, “How to Be an Antiracist” was born half a year too early. While it earned modest accolades when it appeared, it was not until the death of George Floyd in May 2020 that the book exploded into the national consciousness. Readers turned to Kendi’s how-to guide in a bid to understand both the racial inequalities that tragedy exposed as well as the racial turmoil it unleashed. “How to Be an Antiracist” landed at the top of the New York Times bestseller list within weeks of Floyd’s death, turning Kendi into an academic superstar almost overnight. It remained on the list for nearly a year.

Whereas “Stamped” focused on history and policy, Kendi’s follow-up was a field guide for White redemption. In it, Kendi still paid lip service to matters of policy, but his primary focus turned to the psychosocial transformation of individual White Americans and their private attitudes. Unlike his earlier work, which framed anti-racist struggle as a matter of wonkish resistance to bad policies, “How to Be an Antiracist” started conceiving of anti-racism as a personal “journey” toward enlightenment. “Like fighting an addiction,” Kendi counsels, “being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.” He distilled these views to the slogan: “The heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession.”

This transition, from the political to the personal and from the institutional to the individual, hinged on another major conceptual innovation. If “Stamped” aimed to change how Americans viewed the causal relationship between racist ideas and the policies that produce racial inequalities, “How to Be an Antiracist” aspired to transform the public’s view of racism itself. Racism, Kendi argued, was not a grand metaphysical evil that afflicts a smattering of bucktoothed bigots. Rather, racism is everywhere, in everyone, all the time. Kendi’s second big idea was that racism is mundane.

“‘Racist’ is not … a pejorative,” Kendi now insisted. “It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it.” Though conservatives tended to focus on the book’s famous catchphrase — “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” — in my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like “racism” and “white supremacy” into banal, everyday terms like any others.

Once reserved for the gravest of racial trespasses, thanks to the influence of Kendi and other charlatans like Robin DiAngelo, “racism” is now routinely employed to describe anything from workplace microaggressions to terrorist attacks. The march on Charlottesville was white supremacy, but so too is asking Black people to show up to Zoom meetings on time. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss called such terms “floating signifiers”: bits of phraseology that are “void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning.” The mainstreaming of Kendi’s brand of anti-racism has made “racism” into a word so plastic as to have lost all descriptive power — and with it all moral magnitude. At a moment when actual white supremacy is on the rise, the loss of “racist” as a condemnation with real ethical and political power is of grave consequence and may ironically be Kendi’s most significant contribution to American politics.

A charitable reader might argue that the wonkish sensibilities of “Stamped” reflected the wonkish Obama years, while Kendi’s turn to a personalized politics of individual racism reflected widespread anxieties about the return of old-fashioned bigotry under Donald Trump. A less charitable reader might suggest that Kendi’s shift to an anti-racism of personal uplift was a sales tactic: After all, it is relatively easy to get elite universities, corporations and rich progressives to buy into the idea that they personally can make the world better by tweaking their vocabulary and making minor adjustments to their interpersonal etiquette. That vision offers good vibes at low cost.

Regardless of Kendi’s motivations, the pivot from policy to the personal would prove financially profitable and professionally opportune. Now that Kendi’s career seems to be unraveling, his critics have come to take their pound of flesh. And after the deluge of self-help hokum he has produced since Floyd’s murder — not to mention the corporate water-carrying his ideas have facilitated — I don’t begrudge them. But I also think the blame lies not just with Kendi but with the rich donors, CEOs and universities that were eager to purchase their own absolution by bulk-buying anti-racist indulgences.

I greet the Kendi affair in the same way I greeted Everett’s “Erasure” when I first read it a decade ago: It’s yet another warning. As Adolph Reed has noted, the temptation to become a racial spokesman has ensnared any number of Black intellectuals, lured by White prestige and the money that comes with it. In my own small way, I’ve experienced this temptation firsthand.

In June, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled “I am the wrong kind of Black professor,” which criticized the default assumption that Black academics should be interested in Black subjects. Afterward, I found myself inundated by a small flood of requests to write and talk about race in America. Ironically, saying that I’m sick of talking about being Black invited a rush of opportunities to do just that. I’ve happily accepted some of these offers and turned down others. In some cases, saying “no thanks” wasn’t easy.

We all make choices, and I don’t want to suggest that Kendi is a victim or that we should pity him. He basked in the accolades and accepted lavish speaking fees. But though I don’t condone Kendi’s race grift, I do understand how easy it would be to become a grifter. His rise in 2020, and his ignominious decline today, are a mirror held up to liberal America. His failure, intellectual and moral, is as much ours as it is his.

Tyler Austin Harper is an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates College.